Google celebrates its 21st birthday with a doodle

Google is legal! Well, buy a beer anyway. If the legality of some of its other activities is a matter of contention between some State and federal entities, the Web giant celebrates its 21st birthday on Friday with a retro Doodle.

The Doodle shows you what a typical desktop looked like 21 years ago, when Stanford Ph.D. Google's students and co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, published an article entitled: The Anatomy of 39, a hypertextual web search engine on a large scale. In this document, the couple described Google, a prototype of "large-scale search engine" that had a database "of at least 24 million pages".

"We chose the name of our system, Google, because it's a common spelling of googol, or 10100, which fits well with our goal of building search engines on a very large scale," writes the couple in the introduction of the newspaper.

In the 21 years that Brin and Page have exposed their vision of a search engine, the company has grown dramatically. Google's search engine is now indexing hundreds of billions of web pages, but its modest beginnings as a search engine have become the main advertising force. Google now has a parent company, Alphabet, with tentacles that touch everything autonomous cars to its Android mobile software to the extension of life.

But do not look too closely at Google's birth certificate. The company has been celebrating its birthday on September 27th since 2006, but the year before, it celebrated it on September 26th. In 2004 and 2003, it was respectively 7 and 8 September. Google is not even sure why, especially since it was incorporated on September 4, 1998.

Anyway, happy birthday to a company that, for better or for worse, contributed to the inauguration of the information age.